People of The Book is a novel of
contrasting textures. It centres on a young Australian book
conservator, Hannah Heath, working in a Sarajevo library to study
and restore a recently recovered medieval manuscript.
The controlled climate of the library archive where Hannah works
on the exquisite illuminated Haggadah, the Jewish book used to tell
of the biblical Passover, is set amid a broken, chaotic world -
smashed buildings and fractured lives - exemplified by the
librarian, Ozren Karamen, who has taken extraordinary risks to save
the manuscript.
Brooks’ novel revolves around the contrast between the exquisite
care taken to examine the ancient Haggadah, scarcely touching it to
tease out its secrets, and, on the other hand, the many violences,
and spillages - tears, blood, wine - that have shaped its creation
and endangered its survival for more than 600 years, and that now
surround its recovery.
Running parallel with the career-making work she is undertaking
is an exploration of Hannah’s own identity and temperament, and a
process of emotional education she experiences, as her own
concealed familial history is uncovered, and her own defences
touched.
At the novel’s heart is a magnificent opulence. The evocation of
the many textures of the manuscript itself, and the worlds from
which it comes, and into which it arrives, is dazzling.
Brooks’ close focus is like Hannah’s own, and the writing often
has a curatorial precision and focus whose effects are beautiful:
the description of a tiny scrap of an insect’s wing, or the mingled
stain of kosher wine and blood, clues to the book’s journey,
exemplify this.
Brooks, whose previous novel March won a Pulitzer Prize, and
whose otherwise-multifarious fiction and non-fictional work has
focused on themes of travel, exile and loss, is meticulous in her
evocation of the many worlds through which the manuscript
travels.
From Seville in 1480, where extraordinary foresight enables a
father to prepare his daughter for an exceptional life, to the
mountains around Sarajevo in 1940, where fascism and its resistance
endanger the treasured book, Brooks conjures places and events with
clarity.
In this, her talents as a researcher are apparent, and they fuse
with a delicate poetry, through which the sense of painstaking
close work, both Hannah’s and Brooks’, is apparent.
The scarring of books and their creators, protectors and readers
- many of whom are young women - is twined into a narrative about
the spectrum of violences in a bruising world, a metaphor Brooks
handles deftly. She gestures towards complex reverberations about
violence and violation, respect, care and resilience.
The structure of People of the Book is as intricate as
the book’s history, and unfolds in discrete sections as the
disparate clues to its identity themselves appear, moving backwards
in time to the book’s creation. These punctuate Hannah’s
forward-moving story, and relate figuratively to what she herself
learns both through her professional endeavours, and her
relationships.
The worlds evoked through the microscopic clues - the insect’s
wing, a trace of salt - are woven into the overarching narrative of
Hannah’s discovery and self-discovery, which takes on aspects of
the detective novel, as she chases clues and encounters
concealment.
March, which takes as its main character the absent
father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, raised
debate about its protagonist’s likeability. The question of the
extent to which a fictional character needs to be embraced by a
reader is a difficult one, and one that recurs here.
Hannah describes her own emotional aloofness, without any sense
of its being a problem, as though the same clinical style that
characterises her approach to love is exactly that which generates
her professional success. This is tested as the narrative
progresses, though Hannah retains a determined bloodlessness.
One spurned lover (who makes the mistake of imagining himself
with her, hiking in the mountains in the future, completed by a
baby in a back-pack, efficiently puncturing her vision of ideal sex
as light, fun, convenient and disconnected) identifies in her a
species of retrogressive masculinity, moving on at the slightest
taste of emotional entanglement. She doesn’t want things to get
heavy, and she is, as she repeats on a couple of occasions, averse
to “wringing out other people’s soggy hankies”.
Much of this stems back to her relationship with a particularly
monstrous mother - a brilliant neurosurgeon - who is as wealthy,
arrogant and smug as her colleague in fiction, Henry Perrone in Ian
McEwan’s Saturday.
Destructive and ambivalent mothering, especially of daughters,
recurs as a theme throughout the novel’s sub-plots, underlining its
fettering effects. One young mother so abhors the thought of having
a child that she rejoices at the thought of its having been
still-born, while another fills the home with toxic invective that
threatens to cripple her daughter.
Fathers, on the other hand, recur asfigures of salvation, and
this includes the fortunate, albeit posthumous, advent of Hannah’s
own.
There is, in Hannah’s transformation, a sort of Austen-esque
archness, as the young heroine comes to understand something of her
own emotional pride, and the resolution of the strands of the novel
by means of a romance narrative underline its place in this
tradition.
In this way, in ideological terms, the novel can be read as
containing a narrative of Hannah’s own recovery, which eventually
involves placing her back in the bosom of her lost family, and the
arms of a lover (babies in back-packs perhaps no longer so remote a
possibility).
The way Hannah talks about her toughness is obviously telling,
and locates her within a lineage of tough-talking and sexually
acquisitive detectives, but part of this relates to the question of
her voice, which is, from the opening, brash and slangy with the
occasional false note. Her laconic Australianness is something she
seems occasionally aware of as an affectation, such as when a
conference of British art historians, whom Hannah imagines as all
having double-barrelled surnames, finds her bringing out her most
pronounced Australian idiom.
At other times her brashness feels a bit unlikely, or
unexplained. I found it odd, for instance, that Hannah would, in
one of the novel’s most dramatic moments (of which there are quite
a few) - the Haggadah is under threat, Ozren is bereaved and
exhausted - punctuate an impassioned appeal to him with the
appellation “mate”.
Hannah’s Australianness felt, to me, slightly anachronistic, or
confected, or perhaps made with an eye to the international
audience the Australian-born, US-based Brooks no doubt
commands.
In other respects, Brooks’ characterisation is remarkable. Her
ability to evoke the conflicts that tear at an otherwise-devout
Rabbi, or the altruism of resistance in, for example, a young
Muslim wife in Sarajevo in the 1940s, is exceptional.
Brooks’ ability to take an initial inspiration and weave from
fact a vibrant fiction situates it within the rich seams of
“faction”, increasingly frequent in contemporary writing.
Felicity Plunkett teaches literature and poetics at the
University of Queensland.
